A “paw” refers to the foot of poultry, such as chicken, turkey, quail, duck and the like, once the foot is removed from the bird. In conventional poultry processing plants, the bird is hung on an overhead conveyor and killed. As the bird continues to move along the overhead conveyor (referred to as a picking line), the foot or paw can be cut or otherwise separated from the rest of the carcass. The separated bird is transferred to the eviscerating line, while further down the picking line, the foot or paw is removed from the picking line by a paw cutter or foot unloader. As the bird moves down the eviscerating line its passes before a USDA or plant inspector. If the bird is condemned by the inspector, then the paw or foot must be thrown away. Because the time to reach the inspector is shorter than the time for the foot or paw to reach the foot unloader or paw cutter, a paw holding and correlation system must be used. That is, the foot or paw needs to be tracked or indexed so that the paw is traceable to the bird from which it was cut.
Conventional paw holding and correlation systems include a belt conveyor having a length of around one hundred feet or more and a picking line having a length extended by around six hundred feet or more. A shackle count and shift registers in a computer can be used to identify the foot or paw. These belt systems require a large time gate to remove the condemned paws. This throws away many good paws, undesirably lowering the yield of the plant.
Further, long picking lines can be expensive and difficult to install and maintain. Belt systems can require a large amount of room to install the six hundred feet or more of picking line. These belt systems can have great difficulty in maintaining the correlation between the paw and bird because the line can stretch, the inspector can stop the evisceration line and the like. When the correlation is lost, the uncorrelated paws must be disposed of or held until uncorrelated paws can be correlated.
Accordingly, it remains desirable in the pertinent art to provide a paw selector that maintains paws in an ordered, indexed so that the paw can be traced to a carcass.